They are all richly textured, powerful, nuanced books that are immediately arresting but also reward repeated re-reading.įirst graphic novel to win major literary prizes. I’ve chosen five books that I (and many others) regard as central to the graphic novel canon. If there are multiple volumes (as with Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman or the Hernandez brothers’ Love and Rockets series), should the whole series be counted as one epic graphic novel, or should only individual volumes be eligible?Īnd what about a book like Phoebe Gloeckner’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl(2002), which tells the story of an authorial alter-ego, Minnie, through a combination of prose diary entries, illustrations with captions, comic-strip narratives, letters, poems and photographs? Or Joe Sacco’s comic-strip documentary journalism? That the term refers not just to fiction but to life-writing, as in all manner of memoirs, diaries and so on, is accepted – but beyond that there is little consensus. It’s not just the way that such a list is compiled, making agonising decisions over which favourites to exclude, but also because it raises tricky questions of definition. For someone who teaches about the graphic novel, compiling an all-time top five list is challenging.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |